In May 2018, I was mixing for real and\neven if I love doing that, it\u2019s agony all the same. I don\u2019t know how many times\nI remixed the whole album, but 20 times is not an exaggeration. These days we\nuse Dropbox to share files and I made MP3 mixes for Bj\u00f6rn and Herbie to listen\nto and comment. The comments I got were usually variations on a theme of \u201cit\nsounds great\u201d. Ten mixes later the comments were \u201cleave it now Phil. That\u2019s\nenough!\u201d My argument is that I can\u2019t leave it until it sounds like an album and\nnot just a bunch of songs. It must be coherent and I couldn\u2019t leave it until I was\nas close to that as I could get it. In the end I stopped uploading to Dropbox\nuntil I was really finished. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One evening in early August we spent a\ncouple of hours on the jetty by the lake listening to the album on a Bluetooth\nspeaker making plans. On our way back to the house, we stopped on the huge lawn\nand looked at our shadows, which with the sun behind us were 10 meters long.\nHerbie had his camera with him and took a bunch of photos of our shadows.\nBefore we got back to the house we\u2019d decided that we had to use one of those\nstriking images for the front cover. I changed the green grass to red\/orange in\nPhotoshop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mid-July to mid-August I did nothing\nwith the album, or anyway very little. But once I got going again I quite\nquickly reached my mixing limit and couldn\u2019t face doing it anymore. After\nmastering the whole album one last time, I uploaded it to the distributor for\nstreaming sites and converted the album to an image for the CD pressing. And learned\nhow to convert the texts on the back cover and the logo to vector. And the\nfront cover had to be in CMYK not RGB. And it had to fit a template for\nprinting. It all felt never-ending, but of course it did end. \n\nAfter listening to the same songs hundreds of times over the course of 10\nmonths, I was not exactly longing to hear the album when the CDs were finally\ndelivered on 17th<\/sup> September 2018. My normal reaction to a finished\nalbum is that it can take 6 months before I can bear to hear it again. That is\nnot the case with A Padded Room. It took only two days for me to check it out\nand I listened to the whole album twice over. And enjoyed it! And again, the\nnext day. No anxiety at all. There are one or two small things I could have done\nbetter, but it\u2019s nothing I can\u2019t live with. I\u2019m a happy camper!\n\n\n\n W\u00056C\ufffd\u001fB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In May 2018, I was mixing for real and even if I love doing that, it\u2019s agony all the same. I don\u2019t know how many times I remixed the whole album, but 20 times is not an exaggeration. These days we use Dropbox to share files and I made MP3 mixes for Bj\u00f6rn and Herbie … <\/p>\n